Create Dependent Tracker Artifacts

To organize your work with tracker artifacts, you can make an artifact a child or a parent of another artifact.

Make a Tracker Artifact depend on another Artifact

A child artifact can have only one parent.

A parent artifact can have any number of children.

A parent artifact cannot be closed if a child is open.

Note:Open or Closed in this context, refers to a type of status, not the status itself. A tracker administrator can specify a group of statuses such as Deferred, Fixed, Rejected, as equivalent to Closed, while In progress and Under consideration might be specified as Open statuses. For example, when you look at the artifact summaries at the top of any tracker list page, you are seeing a summary of the status type, not the status, of the artifacts.

On the artifact page, click the DEPENDENCIES tab.

Choose or create the related artifact.

If the parent artifact already exists, click Choose Child or Choose Parent. In the pop-up, type in the artifact ID or choose from the list of your recently edited artifacts.

If the related artifact does not exist yet, click Create Child in or Cread Parent in and select the tracker that the new related artifact will belong to. Fill in the form the same way as you would for submitting an unrelated artifact.

Note: If Choose Parent or Create New Parent is not visible, the artifact already has a parent artifact. An artifact can only have one parent artifact.

Click Next.

Write a comment that describes the relationship, if appropriate, and click Finish.

Note: When a dependency is added to or removed from a tracker artifact, a notification mail is sent to users monitoring the artifact. An option is provided at site level and user level to make sure whether the notification mail has to be sent or not. For more information on this, see Configure your Site’s Settings.

The parent-child relationship between the artifacts is established.

To cancel a parent dependency, click Remove.

To cancel a child dependency, select the child artifact and click Remove.

Note: Task dependencies and tracker artifact dependencies are different from each other.

For tracker artifacts, an artifact with dependencies ( a “parent” artifact) can’t be considered closed unless all of its dependent artifacts (“children”) are closed.
For tasks, a dependency means one task can’t start until another task is completed.

Context Menu to create Dependencies, Associations or Add Attachments

Use the context menu available in planning folder list view to quickly choose a “parent” or “child”, remove a “parent”, add associations, add attachments or clone artifacts.

In the planning folder list view, you can see a down arrow icon next to the artifact ID (as shown in the following screen)when you move your mouse pointer over artifact rows.

Down arrow icon

A context-sensitive menu pops up on clicking the down arrow icon.

Context menu if an artifact has a parent

Context menu if an artifact has no parent

To quickly choose a parent or child, add associations and attachments, or remove a parent: